What Doesn't Kill You
by Louise24601
Summary: In the life of Michael Scofield, and in those of the people he knows and loves, there has been darkness. They have no regrets. They are who they are today for the main part because of the things that haven't killed them. Drabbles. Mi/Sa. Warnings: drug use, character death.
1. Chapter 1

**AN** : This is a piece I have enjoyed writing more than I expected, due to the grimness of the theme. I hope you enjoy it as well. The song alluded to towards the end is "Heroes" by David Bowie. Feedback is always welcome.

Chapter 1: Never-ending Summer

Sara often wonders whether one is attracted to drugs by circumstances or by disposition. Do they appeal to us, because of our environment – because they are in our reach, because those who take them seem to be having a blast – or do they speak to us, from the deepest of ourselves, call out to our very essence, with the guile of the devil and promises of heaven?

The answer, in her case, is indisputable.

Sara did not love drugs because the people who surrounded her had fun with it. Her passion for morphine was inherent, irrepressible. Individual, private almost. The happiness that she felt, when morphine was coursing through her body, spreading a blissful numbness within her overworking brain, knew no match or rival. After having chased one rush after the other, studies and medicine and action, always action, Sara found peace, rest, and relief. She found herself, too.

And she loved it, most immediately, with an unconditional allegiance that could only be described as religious.

As many people who escape suffering through avoidance, Sara had taken hiding in work. In school, as early as she could remember, she had done what was in her power to be the best, not because she sought recognition or praise, but to have a life busy enough to shield herself from the tormenting truth that was to be found, in solitude.

Because Sara Tancredi had grown up in a house empty of love, had been raised by parents empty of spirit, and had always been terribly afraid to be confronted to who she was, convinced, somehow, that she would be faced with the dark immateriality of utter emptiness.

Morphine was the first repose of Sara's exhausting flight. It provided her with a tranquility she had never found in anything, and with sufficient numbness to allow her to disregard the source. Drugs had been to her, before, what it is to any well-educated girl. Dangerous. Destructive. Sara had avoided them as she had avoided real romance, and anything likely to steal from her the rigid control with which her life was ruled.

Control had been to her an efficient tool to contain her suffering. The loss of it was a free fall down the unstable grounds of unrestricted ecstasy.

The discovery of morphine-induced happiness was so tangible, its reality so difficult to dispute, that Sara could almost completely disregard what she was losing in the process. Morphine became altogether her sickness and savior. Mindful of the details, at the beginning, Sara was like a denial-struck college girl in love for the first time. She learnt with sedulous attention what parties to be invited to and whose company to seek, to be able to be in reach of the most valued drug, and sweetened the disreputable process of the needle as well as she could, as if this were actually a mandatory vaccine shot; looking away from the square of white skin that the syringe was digging into, counting to ten and aiming for distracting thoughts.

Soon, she could not say how soon exactly, the blissful state of her intoxication washed away any need to extenuate the realities of her addiction. Morphine was something that Sara now likes to think of as a vortex – it is the only way fit to describe the effortless velocity with which it sucked in everything that she used to think mattered, her friends and family and plans for the future. Those were actually first to go, and easiest to let go of. It was yet another while before the substance took her pride, and a longer one still before it took her shame. Before she became willing to do absolutely anything to obtain it; to crawl on broken glass, or walk in a house on fire, if such things had been required.

Rapidly enough, it was no longer sufficient to know the right places to go to, to be allowed a taste of the drug. The people who owned it wanted to earn money for it; and Sara found that she could no longer be kept going just with a sample.

Impudently, Sara began to tell as many lies as was required to be granted money from her father. She can no longer recall all of them, but the barefacedness with which she told them and the utter lack of remorse is something that still haunts her now. It did not matter that her father worried. It would not have mattered, to her, that he was crawling under debts.

The prickling sensation that would run across the blue vein of her arm, as if to warn her of the risk of withdrawal, was the only thing she cared for. It woke her up in the morning and kept her up at night. The needle that, at first, she needed distraction from, had become as sweet a sight as any she could fathom.

Now, Sara doesn't dream of making any excuses for her behavior – but she will say that it did feel as if her life depended on the regular dose of morphine that she was granted, vital, it seemed, to her functioning, on the same scale as water and oxygen.

Perhaps it would have helped, if she had been made of a stronger character, with personality traits vigorous enough to push her to rebel. Perhaps it would have made no difference.

The entirety of who Sara was, before morphine, was swept away in the hurricane-like spiral of being high. That there was no one to truly mourn her disappearance only made the process easier.

"Are you quite okay?"

Michael's question steals Sara from the gloom of her reminiscing reverie. They are both sitting at the kitchen table, and he has interrupted his minute chopping of vegetables for Mikey's lunchbox to pause and look at her. The book which she has been pretending to read for the past half-hour is still open at the first page of a fresh chapter. She thought it might be enough to prevent her husband from noticing what's on her mind. He does get insanely thorough when he cooks.

"Fine." She says; doesn't really try to conceal the disconsolate gloom in her voice, gleaming with the untruth of her statement.

Her husband has always been one to pay attention to the smallest of details; he is an expert at catching her in those occasional moments of fleeting despondency, though this is the first time that her addiction will come up.

Michael has a lawful right to insist, and he does, "You've just been so quiet, all afternoon. And you don't usually spend so much time on the same page of a book."

She closes it right on, as an act of good faith.

Faith, Sara has learnt, is an important thing to possess.

"It's just so silly," she realizes it is, as she says it.

Nearly a decade as elapsed since she's left morphine behind and it should feel as old as another life she can nearly forget has been her own. Silly is the only word for the fact that it still gets to her, now, although it shouldn't, although she is not even the same person as that twenty-year-old girl who wanted freedom and fulfillment. Who wanted more than anything to stop being afraid of the unknown features of her identity, the desert places of her own mind and fears.

How silly it is only makes it hurt twice as much, Sara thinks, and watches the comprehension on her husband's face, as he thinks the same thing.

"I was driving Mikey home," she starts, without giving him the time to ask again, "and this old song came up on the radio. I used to love that song," she adds, without sounding apologetic to omit the title, "it was the kind of music I felt privately connected to, the kind I would be outraged to hear at a party or other kind of social gathering. I listened to it, only when I was alone –" Already the ghost of her twenty-year-old self emerges from oblivion, how she would lock the door of her commodious college girl apartment, sit on the carpet of her living room, cross-legged, putting on a show of casualness for an invisible audience, and candidly roll up the sleeve of her blouse.

Telling Michael is worth the reminiscing stab that this disappeared young girl brings about. Yet, Sara finds she resents that being a mother and a wife, the title so definitive in how it sounds and how it echoes with the familiarity of a happy household, does not altogether erase her past.

"I listened to it when I got high."

It's surprising that her voice doesn't jam with shame at the confession, that there is no sadness in her eyes or any other telltale sign to indicate this is not a level statement like any other, uncharged with weight or meaning.

Michael doesn't say anything, for a long while. Their relationship is beyond any pretense, making up for their ragged start, and so he does not look deliberately earnest, or say any ready comforting words like an actor repeating lines.

"You don't listen to it anymore." He guesses.

"I hadn't in a while." Nor would she have expected that she would actually mind it, now – it's just a silly old song about being heroes, about beating all of the rest of the world forever and ever – and yet when those first notes filled the car, leaden with the specter of Sara's forgotten past, she could feel the electric brutality of its arising, taste the pungent ashes of its resurrection.

And just like that, while Mikey was dozing peacefully in the backseat, while she was driving towards the steady home of her healthy life, she could feel the pin-like stung of needles inside her flesh, the prickling sensation, still familiar, running up her forearm.

Michael inhales, softly, and she knows it'll pain him to let the air out, that it hurts him to breathe when he is helpless to prevent her suffering.

"I don't miss it," she informs. "I really don't. It's just so unexpected that my body would still react to the thought of it, like waking up instantly to the smell of food when you're hungry. I figured I would be past this, now. When I do think of morphine, which isn't often, it's always with this satisfying, flattering distance, like I've successfully buried my old demons."

That last part is spoken half with amusement, wanting to laugh at how easy it is to imagine the eyes of her fellow addicts in rehab and meetings on her, the semblance of a jury, whose thoughts are actually running astray from every word you say, sorting through your words to give them a meaning closer to their own situations, like birds picking worms out of a carcass.

The look of unwavering affection that Michael gives her is the farthest thing from that customary attention. "Perhaps the worst things that we do," he hazards, "the obscure places we need to visit to carry out certain actions – perhaps nothing about this darkness stays buried for long."

It's not what Sara was expecting him to say. It doesn't sound very reassuring. Yet again. After all that they've been through, all that they've seen, maybe mere reassurance is beside the point.

"I think it's okay that it resurfaces," he admits. "When on random mornings, having breakfast with you and Mikey, I remember that I've had a dream about Fox River the previous night, it hits me so violently, the contrast between then and now – but I don't try to hide it under anything, I don't use our happiness as a cover. What I've been through, what you've been through – it's part of who we are, part of what brought us to where we are now."

The blunt honesty with which he speaks makes it vain for her to deflect when he wonders, "What are you afraid of, Sara?"

She's always liked the sound of her name in his mouth. He speaks it with the lyricism of a poet and the devotion of a believer, as if she were something to be worshipped.

"What if it's still in me," she says, "that emptiness I was so afraid of when I started using?"

"It'd be okay if it was. You'd find ways to occupy it, to face it, that would not involve any self-harm." He does seem to believe this, as hard as one can believe in anything. "You'll never take morphine again, Sara."

"But what if part of me always wants to?" That's not really what she means, and the second attempt hits closer to home. "What if that vacant part inside of me is still there, somewhere, still terrified of its own emptiness and willing to take any escape to fill it? What if it takes over?"

"That won't happen. I won't let it."

"What if it swallows me?"

"I won't let go. Look at me, Sara. I won't let go."

The briefness of her questions and his replies is like a game of throwing something at each other and giving it back. The placating quietness of his words slowly overcomes her rapid heartbeat and shallow breath, the uneasiness in her mind is sucked back in.

The look in his eyes is earnest, steadfast, and Sara holds on to it, waits for it to restore her life as she knows it, the peacefulness in her mind riding on a quiet blue wave.

Without breaking eye-contact, Michael bypasses the table to break the distance between them, and when the warm palm of his hand rests on her shoulder, brushing her neck, she knows for sure that the war against the needle-prickling in her arm is won. Her husband's hand is still damp from the raw vegetables he was chopping and he smells faintly of cilantro.

"I love you so much," she says.

He smiles and leans in to kiss the top of her head, then takes a long inhale. The strawberry shampoo she uses is his favorite – he says it makes holding her feel like a never-ending summer.

"I know," he answers, and after a few minutes, when he can tell she's okay, he walks back to his own side of the table, and starts chopping vegetables again.

Maybe there is no such thing as never-ending summers, Sara thinks, watching the beautiful man in front of her cooking dinner for their son, and that doesn't seem to matter.

They will face winter together, when it comes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2: Michael**

Blood.

The blood, beating at Michael's temples as Lincoln closes his eyes, and opens his mouth. The words come out –

 _She's dead, Michael._

– but all Michael hears is his own pulse, the flow of blood rushing to his saturated brain.

"I wanted to tell you –"

"Shut up."

"They still have LJ, Mike. If you don't do as they ask –"

 _Shut up_.

Michael wants to scream, to throw himself against the gate and claw at it, like some animal at the zoo. No point, suddenly, in being human, in showing human reactions.

But the world about him is all too overwhelming. The heat of Panama wraps him in its drowsy hold. On his forehead, beads of sweat are drawing patterns through the layer of dust coating his skin.

The sight of his pleading brother on the other side of that gate fuels the firepit in Michael's stomach, the rage is wild, unreasonable, and the young man turns suddenly around. Doesn't care that Lincoln is crying for him to come back, to listen.

All that matters to Michael right now is that Lincoln was free to go as he wanted, to look for Sara all over Panama before it was too late, while he himself was in here, locked in this hellhole. It doesn't make much sense to hate Lincoln for this but what's ever made sense about hate?

It comes, thick and boiling through Michael's veins, towering terrifyingly above all Michael feels has made him who he is – kindness, compassion. No.

None of that, anymore.

It crawls in, like serpents, eating their way through the young man's body. They want –

( _blood_ )

Michael is barely standing on his feet.

The world around him is sucking in his oxygen, whirling, and he's on his knees by the time he makes it to his cell.

Not that people here would notice. This place, Michael believes, has seen more people crawling than any other in the world.

Alone, Michael finds balance against the wall, realizes how his lungs feel crushed and throws his shirt over his head. Then, half-naked, he presses his sleek forehead to his knees, and he lets them in – a gentle welcome.

 _Yes, come in, come in._ Like a mother answering its baby spiders. _I want you I want you I want you._ They come in waves, and Michael is swallowed whole, the memories eating him up, his cannibalistic children.

The soft feel of Sara's jawline against his palm when he asked her ( _cowardly, unthinking_ ), "Wait for me." He didn't know what he was going to say until he heard the word cross his lips. Not every choice matters in making the life you lead, but Michael thinks this was one of the choices that did.

And he didn't think of it as a choice, not until a long time – he realizes – not until now.

It crosses his mind, he could have let his brother go on with the escape plan without him. That would have seemed ridiculous, at the time, but it doesn't now, as Michael's head beats steadily against his joint knees.

The dirt on the wall clings to his bare back, which still wears the patterns of his first genius escape – what good is it, he wonders, to be good at running, at saving your own skin? It strikes him, suddenly, as the sickest talent.

He could be in Fox River, right now. Seeing Sara for his daily shot of insulin.

(He would have had to tell her about not being a diabetic eventually, but not while he was still in prison, not when they were his tickets into the infirmary.)

"Hello, Michael," he could hear her saying softly. Not looking at him – more often than not, looking anywhere _but_ him, her brown eyes focused on the plastic gloves she was slapping on or the needle or the tiny square of tattooed sink on his forearm where she stuck him.

It had a very dignified quality, the way Sara Tancredi _wouldn't_ look at you. Not like a frightened girl shying away from you.

No.

Just like there were plenty of other things to look at, to pay attention to. Like she'd seen hundreds of men like you before.

Michael remembers the gut-clenching charm of her raw cynicism, the way her eyes occasionally crossed his, crying out their unbelief. _You won't change me_ , those eyes seemed to scream, or rather whisper, too weary for screaming.

And yet, picturing the startled smile on her lips as she discovered his birthday gift – his love for Sara is just _like_ that gift, immortal roses, cold and paper-made, dead and undying.

It flashes through Michael's mind that it was all worth it, breaking his brother out of prison, just for meeting her – just for putting that single smile on her lips.

Then, he realizes if he'd never met Sara Tancredi, she would still have her old life, she would still be _alive_ , and with his body showing no resistance, he breaks down in tears.

The wails slipping from his mouth strike him with how _inhuman_ they sound. Around Michael, the world is black – his eyes are closed, pressed against his knees – and in his mind, he sees wolves crying alone in the night.

"Oh God." Are the only words he can recognize, coming back over and over, as he thinks of the fragile look in Sara's eyes when she let him kiss him, on that train to Chicago – he'd never seen so much of strength and vulnerability in a single human being before. _Oh God oh God_.

Going to Sona was supposed to be his way to save her.

 _You've given up everything for me before. Now, it's my turn. Time for me to say thank you_.

Time passes, leaving Michael unaware, unaffected. When an occasional inmate swings by to ask him what's his deal – pester him, like children throwing rocks at a snake through the bars of its cage – Michael lifts up his face and hisses at them, until they're gone, until around him is an invisible circle that cuts him out from the rest of the world.

Slowly, very slowly, Michael's head grows cooler.

Not to say that the burning fire in his stomach quiets down, but he becomes able to think past it, to think _through_ it, and it comes to him that he's not going to die.

Not for a longer while.

He must keep his nephew safe, but this isn't the only reason – the _real_ reason.

"I'm going to get them." He says to himself; the words are muffled as he speaks into his own flesh. His arms are laced around his knees, and his mouth is pressed against his palm, locked in a tight fist. "I'll get them, Sara. If I have to butcher the whole world."

But the first person he knows he'll butcher in the process is himself –

The man he was, before any of this started. Before Fox River.

That saying about not being able to take the con out of the man.

Maybe Michael could have stayed true to his principles, valuing human life, always, even over vengeance, if it had stopped there – if it had just been his father and Veronica, and all the suffering he and his brother went through to survive.

But not like this.

Not with _her_.

" _Sara_."

The word feels hot into his mouth. In his head, the memories are still flashing – he remembers her charming detachment as she told him, "Let me tell you one thing, Michael, the words _trust me_ mean absolutely nothing between these walls."

Michael opens his eyes. Night has fallen and he feels invisible, huddled against the wall, the warmth of his own breath against his skin recalling at least his body to life.

"Forgive me," he whispers.

Then, he gets on his feet. Michael's mourning will be underwater, calm on the surface, but cold and deadly. It'll be like living with a new being inside his head – that monster made of fire that begs for justice – and every decision Michael will make, from now on, will be guided by that new voice.

Mahone crosses his path as Michael makes his way through the darkness, dark maze-like paths he finds his way in like a natural. "Michael, are you –"

"Stop talking. I'm fine."

He is.

At last, Michael is ready to start thinking again – thinking about breaking himself out of here, playing the company's game. Thinking about _the plan_.

His bloody plans.

They might have gotten Sara killed, but he'll make damned sure that they'll avenge her. If it kills him.

…

 **End Notes:** I realize this piece is very dark. To be fair, the series "What Doesn't Kill You" _was_ created specifically for dark moments in the lives of the _Prison Break_ characters. It just feels to me we never accessed Michael's feelings in the show when he found out about Sara's death, so I wanted to add this missing piece in case anyone felt the same way. Please let me know what you think about it, and be sure to tell me if there's something in particular you'd like to see in this series.


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